While major hacks of retail outlets like Target have made national news over the last year, writes Mark Spivey for ICD-10 Monitor, what hasn't been addressed by the media enough as of late has been the security of medical information in the switchover to ICD-10.
Mr. Spivey spoke with healthcare IT expert Stanley Nachimson, who said that what most concerns him is that the HIPAA security rule — which lays out requirements for safeguarding medical electronic documents and the like — is almost a dozen years old but that healthcare providers are still woefully underprepared and vulnerable to hackers.
"I think what's happened is that data security and privacy has taken sort of a back seat to the need for implementing electronic health records, implementing administrative transactions, and implementing big changes like ICD-10. It's a secondary thought rather than a primary thought," Mr. Nachimson said.
Should a major data breach occur around the same time ICD-10 is implemented, a great deal of damage could be done, Mr. Spivey argues.
Juliet Santos, of Leidos Health, one of the country's leading information technology consulting groups for the healthcare companies, argues in the article that providers need to start thinking about both cybersecurity and ICD-10.
"With the widespread adoption of electronic records, ICD-10 testing and all of the other upgrades that we're doing, we've really become more vulnerable to intrusion than even the retail or financial services," she said.
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